Episode 24 / Among Footsteps

What histories are hidden beneath the places we walk every day?
In this episode, we explore Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming (2006), a series in which the artist photographs herself, usually from behind, standing and walking through monumental public spaces in cities including Rome and Seville.

Her presence quietly changes the way we see these places. Architecture becomes more than stone and marble; it becomes part of a layered history shaped by empire, migration, exclusion and memory.

Through Roaming, we consider the city as a palimpsest, a place where traces of earlier lives remain beneath the present, and walking as a way of learning to notice them.
Sometimes a familiar place changes simply because we learn to see whose footsteps came before our own.

Every walk enters a story already in progress. We inherit landscapes shaped by countless lives before our own

Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming, completed in 2006, places the artist within monumental public spaces, often photographed from behind as she stands, pauses or walks through them. Rather than functioning as conventional self-portraits, the photographs encourage us to look with Weems, directing our attention toward the architecture and histories surrounding her.

Throughout her career, Weems has explored race, memory, identity and power. In Roaming, these questions emerge through her physical presence within spaces historically associated with authority and empire. Without illustrating history directly, the photographs allow older narratives of exclusion, migration and memory to resonate through the present.

The episode considers these cities as palimpsests: places continually rewritten without completely erasing what came before. Walking becomes a particularly powerful way of experiencing those layers, allowing changes in architecture, streets and public space to reveal themselves gradually.

Seen this way, Roaming asks us to reconsider even familiar places. Every square, staircase and street has been crossed by countless people before us, many of whom have disappeared from official histories. Walking attentively can make those absent footsteps perceptible again.

View Roaming , 2006, by Carrie May Weems on the artist’s website

Sources & Further Reading

Images & Works

Carrie Mae Weems. A Broad and Expansive Sky—Ancient Rome, from Roaming. 2006. Digital C-print.

Carrie Mae Weems. The Edge of Time—Ancient Rome, from Roaming. 2006. Digital C-type print. 

Carrie Mae Weems. When and Where I Enter—Mussolini’s Rome, from Roaming. 2006. Digital C-print.

Carrie Mae Weems. Piazza del Popolo I—Ancient Rome, from Roaming. 2006.

Texts & Ideas

Kathryn E. Delmez, ed. Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Frist Center for the Visual Arts / Yale University Press, 2012. 

Deborah Willis. “Photographing between the Lines: Beauty, Politics, and the Poetic Vision of Carrie Mae Weems.” In Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, edited by Kathryn E. Delmez. Yale University Press, 2012.

bell hooks. “Diasporic Landscapes of Longing.” In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. The New Press, 1995.

Heidi Morse. “‘When and Where I Enter’: Black Feminist Classicism in the Photography of Carrie Mae Weems.” In Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, Oxford University Press, 2020.